In marketing today, there is an ongoing tension between moving fast and getting the message right, and that tension is especially sharp when the category for your product or service is still being defined.
For a company building something new, marketing isn’t limited to what you say; it's a question of how to earn trust, reach very different buyers, and keep pace with a market that changes every week.
In this conversation, Jean English, CMO of CoreWeave, shares how she built a marketing function in the weeks leading up to an IPO. She discusses how her team maintains consistent messaging across different buyers and where AI helps and falls short. She also explains why she believes playing it safe is the biggest risk a marketer can take.
🎥 Watch the episode on YouTube
Building a Marketing Function Before the IPO
In Jean’s first ninety days at CoreWeave, she hit the ground running. The company was going public in less than a month, so she had to get CoreWeave’s story out into the world right away. With a team of twelve and no customer personas, she had to dig through past customer interactions to figure out who their buyers actually were, in order to sharpen the company’s mission and value proposition. In due time, she successfully got the campaign running across broadcast TV, out-of-home, and digital.
Notably, she had no playbook to reference. So in order to get the job done, she identified the gaps and built out full teams for communications, product marketing, brand, partnerships, and demand generation to achieve their goal of staying credible at the speed of AI. Her first budget was ten times bigger than anything the company had spent before, which she eventually doubled. In her words, the only way it worked was because she got the CFO on board early and tied every dollar to results the team could actually measure.
One Framework for Many Buyers
CoreWeave sells to researchers, developers, CTOs, chief AI officers, CEOs, CISOs, CFOs, and CIOs, and each group cares about something different. To reach these audiences, Jean documents key value propositions, supporting evidence, and customer pain points, then uses AI to tailor messaging to each group. To maintain consistency, her team developed a point-of-view document centered on three differentiators: pace, performance, and partnership. Customers later identified these same differentiators as reasons they chose CoreWeave. With the market evolving rapidly, the team balances consistent messaging with speed, announcing a new product or service approximately every two weeks.
Using AI Where It Works
Her team first used AI to analyze every interaction in Salesforce and build personas through synthetic research, which she told them would be about eighty percent right and good enough to start testing. Jean English finds AI most useful for synthesizing large amounts of data. However, she believes it falls short when developing original messaging, especially when defining a product’s differentiation. She recommends writing the initial long-form messaging yourself, then using AI to adapt it into different formats. The same thinking guides her tool choices. After CoreWeave acquired five companies that each used a different tool stack, she moved the team onto one common set. Since a new AI tool appears nearly every week, Jean chooses tools that connect into automated workflows and work with agents instead of chasing the newest option.
Partnerships Measured by More Than Brand Lift
The Aston Martin Formula 1 partnership, one of the first things CoreWeave’s founders asked Jean to explore, shows how she evaluates a sponsorship. She looks for real technical collaboration, brand lift, and a way to bring customers together. The partnership applies AI to the data Aston Martin collects from the track, the car, and simulations. The wind tunnel simulation was even renamed the AI research tunnel. The car placement and the AI research tunnel gives CoreWeave visibility, while race weekends give AI developers, researchers, and lab CEOs a reason to meet one another.
The Risk of Standing Still
When we asked what mistake she sees other B2B marketers make, her answer was direct:
“Playing it safe is probably the biggest risk. In this age, you gotta make a bold move.”
Declaring something first, whether a new category or a new product, takes confidence. Waiting for someone else to declare it means arriving late. She hires with the same mindset, using the mantra “be bold, be kind” to look for people who have taken risks. She learned this from the ones that failed, but stayed open-minded. She keeps the focus on people rather than technology, telling stories through use cases to make high-intensity work environments safer.
Need to make bold marketing moves in a market that changes every week? Contact us to explore how we can help you build messaging and content that keeps pace.
